App of the Week: Turn your Live Photos into shareable videos with ImgPlay

Apple’s Live Photos are great, letting you capture little snippets of audio and moving images with every photo you take. For someone who takes a ton of photos but hardly any video, shooting Live Photos lets me look back on pictures of group photos, action shots and selfies that have a little bit of life to them. But sharing those moments can be challenging.

That’s where ImgPlay comes in. It takes your Live Photos and turns them into videos that can be shared pretty much anywhere. With Facebook, Instagram and Twitter all supporting inline video, moving images are quickly becoming the norm.

But ImgPlay doesn’t just turn Live Photos into raw video versions of the same thing; you can trim the clip, reverse, or even loop it backward and forward for a seamless animation. The trimming part may be the most helpful, since about half my Live Photos end with my pointing the camera at the ground.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozNO_B1Wefc

ImgPlay works with burst photos too, letting you turn those action shots into videos. You can even just choose standard photos to stitch together into looping videos or GIFs. You can edit the speed on those to make a little slideshow of an event or vacation.

Once you’ve got a looping video that looks good, you can export it as a standard GIF or a video. If you choose the latter, you can choose how many times you want it to repeat. ImgPlay even shows you how long the resulting video will be, so you can always fit it into Instagram’s 15 second video limit.

But the real beauty of the app is the simplicity. Some other apps that let you share Live Photos don’t offer editing options, or else they overwhelm you with useless UI. ImgPlay only shows you Live Photos to choose from, then offers extremely straightforward options for editing the video. Everything is pretty quick too, so you’re not waiting forever for things to render.

The app is free to download on iOS, but you’ll have to pay $1.99 if you don’t want a watermark on each of your images. That means you can test out the dead-simple interface and make sure the videos are up-to-snuff for your Twitter feed or Facebook page.

App of the Week is a regular feature of the GeekWire radio show and podcast, airing at 7 p.m. Saturdays and 1 p.m. Sundays on KIRO Radio (97.3 FM) in the Seattle region, except when pre-empted by live sports. The show runs every weekend on GeekWire.com. Get every episode using this RSS feed, or subscribe in iTunes, SoundCloud and Stitcher. Note: GeekWire may receive a share of the revenue from your purchase of apps or content through affiliate partnerships.

James Risley is a technology writer living in Seattle. He’s written for the Medill News Service and helped build small, news-focused web tools for covering transportation and politics. You can follow James on Twitter or Instagram and reach him at james@geekwire.com.